Nah, the spammers will just find something else to sell, like they did with Vioxx. See the quote by spam king Pone Leray in Vioxx recall reduces worldwide spam
True, the SQL syntax for Cloudscape 10.0 is apparently a subset of the DB2 syntax. So there's definitely a migration path there, which is good for DB2. So the focus is still on DB2. This is one way to move customers over to DB2 if Derby doesn't meet their requirements. Similar to what Microsoft has done with MSDE (now SQL Server Express), except that the IBM way is arguably much friendlier since they've open sourced the codebase instead of just allowing free redistribution of Windows-only binaries.
IBM acquired Cloudscape as a by-product of acquiring Informix. Open sourcing it is one way to get rid of YADB (yet another database) to focus on their bread and butter, DB2. Probably not a bad deal for them in the sense that it generates lots of goodwill in the community at the same time.
Not that I'm cynical or anything.
Not sure Cloudscape actually qualifies as "lightweight". Current Java-capable handheld devices are still pretty limited in what they can run, in many cases you still have to go down to the C/C++ level to truly get the "pedal to the metal". Over time this will correct itself, of course, but for now the choices for data persistence in Java are very limited. Most people I know end up rolling their own solution on top of MIDP's Record Management System.
Copyright rules vary greatly from country to country, though lately there's been more harmonization. The general rule is that copyright lasts for X years past the author's death or Y years in absolute terms if the author is in fact a corporation. The values for X and Y vary by country. Even within a country they can vary depending on when the work was created and what copyright legislation was in effect at the time. This makes it extremely difficult to figure out which works are in the public domain or not. Sometimes things ended up in the public domain because they weren't properly declared. But with the Berne convention in force over most of the world, you can't assume that no copyright declaration means that there is no copyright. It's a bit of a mess, and this surely won't be the only lawsuit they'll encounter.
If you don't have that much content and it doesn't change too often, then a CMS isn't absolutely necessary, is it? (My "CMS" is vi and psftp, I guess...)
Although it's always dangerous to generalize, I like to explain the differences between the Treo and the BlackBerry this way:
BlackBerry: email with applications Treo: applications with email
You can build applications for both platforms, but the BlackBerry is still seen (and being used) primarily as a mobile email device. You can send and read email with the Treo, but you can run many more useful apps on it than on the BB. Which one is better? As usual, it depends on what you need...
Nothing new here except that Google has all of a sudden made it easier to look up "private" information that is locally cached. The data is already there for someone who knows what to look at, after all, but now Google's made it easy to access. How is this different from typing something into the address bar of a browser and being presented with an "interesting" list of choices that were stored via the browser's autocomplete functionality?
Given the prevalence of camera phones in Japan, does anyone there try to ban their use in places like washrooms, change rooms, movie theatres, etc? Is it even possible to get a "pure" cellphone (no camera or fancy extras) in Japan these days?
Indeed. Try even putting a regular Bluetooth adapter next to your Wi-Fi router and see what happens. I wrote about this before http://www.mobilizedsoftware.com/showArticle.jhtml ?articleId=17501803. That's the price you pay for the convenience of unlicensed spectrum. It's made me hold off from getting a 2.4GHz cordless phone to replace the crappy 900MHz phone I already have -- just one more thing to interfere with the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks. (The microwave, at least, doesn't run that often...)
I have seen programmers obsessed with efficiency and speed waste time and money.
I have seen programmers obsessed with pleasing management waste time and money. Let's face it, there are zillions of ways to waste time and money. Writing more efficient code is a lesser evil in my mind.
We must change our thinking away from the idea of building a better mouse-trap toward selling mouse-traps.
Outside of academia, this has always been the case. Look at the top people at most technology companies, you'll see that they're business people -- usually from a sales and/or marketing background -- and not techies. Or they might have been techies in some early life but over the years migrated into selling roles. I think, though, that few techies have the skills to make that kind of leap. So just telling people to brush up on people skills isn't going to cut it, either. If you firmly believe that good programming skills are innate (more art than science) then chances are that good selling skills are also innate.
I guess I have no answers about the bigger questions this raises. That's why we're debating it. I still think, though, that it's useful for programmers to understand how sorting works so that they can choose the correct algorithm for each situation. Really, you don't go to university to learn to be a programmer, you go to university to learn how to learn what you need when you need it. IMHO.
The reader comments on these articles are themselves interesting. I especially think this one is telling: "As a Java programmer I haven't looked up searching and sorting algorithms in Knuth". Being a Java programmer myself, I can certainly appreciate having these kinds of algorithms in a standard library. I still think you should spend some time with Knuth or some other book (or online documentation) and understand how they work. That's one problem I see, not enough programmers today learning the fundamentals and just letting the libraries do all the hard lifting for them.
For a real blast from the past, check out the REXX FAQ that I maintained for a couple of years. Copies are still floating around the net, including here:
It seems so... old, I guess. But REXX itself was fun to use, and I spent a lot of time using it and writing applications with (and for) it. It was very approachable, a good way to learn basic programming concepts. It definitely rocked on the Amiga because it was so well-integrated with the system. If OS/2 had not failed, it might still be here, because it was also decently integrated there.
I actually preferred Amazon's default search algorithm before they introduced "Search Inside the Book", because it limited its searches to the bibliographic data. Now when I do a search I get lots of books that contain the words I'm searching for, but that's not usually what I want. Annoying, and I have to go to the advanced search page for what I want.
I think keeping Google's Web index separate from the Print index is a good thing, based on this experience.
Since there's been some mention of ASA (Adaptive Server Anywhere, aka SQL Anywhere), just thought I'd mention (sorta late) that ASA users are encouraged to fill out a survey put up by the iAnywhere database engineering team to improve the product:
http://www.ianywhere.com/promos/sql_survey/index.h tml
Thanks...
Eric
For more info about J2ME....
on
J2ME Polish 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A lot of developers are confused about J2ME, I have some overviews on my site at www.ericgiguere.com/j2me that should clear things up somewhat, including my handy-dandy J2ME acronym list.
Things are getting more exciting in the J2ME world, though I'd like to see more devices supporting the Personal Profile come on the market. It's interesting what people can do with today's devices and the quite-limited-in-comparison Mobile Information Device Profile.
These techniques are still in use today, actually. Although it's getting better, many Java-enabled cellphones (those that support J2ME, Java 2 Micro Edition) have a very small amount of space available for installing and running applications. So an important thing to do is to make your application as small as possible. You do some of this by refactoring your code, but you can also make your code smaller by running it through an obfuscator, because the obfuscator will replace all the long symbolic names (which are stored in the.class files) with shorter, meaningless ones as well as remove unreachable code, etc. But same basic techniques.
Yes, you also see him on TV pushing (good way to describe it!) All-Bran quite, ahem, regularly in Canada. I just find it funny that they don't use his name anywhere on the box. That's why I call him the "nameless cereal box celebrity"...
SOCAN is a performing rights agency. It is the Canadian equivalent of BMI and ASCAP in the United States. These organizations collect money for the composers and publishers of music. They do not collect money for the recording artists. (Note that the composers and publishers are often different from the recording artists.) And they're not an industry lobby group like the RIAA.
You can always have your browser masquerade as a different browser. See my page Masquerading Your Browser for details. There's a link at the bottom to a page with instructions for Mac users.
Actually, I'm looking to record mostly voice & piano. I want to use a PC laptop mainly because I don't want to setup a mini-studio in the living room, where the grand piano is, so a portable solution appeals to me. I was looking at the Yamaha UW500 Personal Studio, and it looks pretty good, anyone have any experience with it or similar devices? Mostly I'm looking to record stuff to put up on my website. The gear built into the laptop just doesn't cut it -- play anything lound on the piano and it gets all distorted.
I've looked around for some advice, but most of it seems to be geared towards MIDI stuff or else involves equipment that is way too expensive for what I want to do.
The Java try-catch-finally construct is not the same as nesting a try-catch within another try-catch because the finally block is always executed. In your scenario the finally is only executed if an exception is thrown. Adding a throw at the end of the inner try will make it behave like try-catch-finally, but then you have to have code in the outer catch to distinguish between the various cases. try-catch-finally is a simpler way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
... as the people running behind the truck with their laptops can only get healthier!
Eric
How to masquerade your browser (Hint: Firefox makes it easy)
Nah, the spammers will just find something else to sell, like they did with Vioxx. See the quote by spam king Pone Leray in Vioxx recall reduces worldwide spam
Eric
See the HTTP headers your browser is sending
True, the SQL syntax for Cloudscape 10.0 is apparently a subset of the DB2 syntax. So there's definitely a migration path there, which is good for DB2. So the focus is still on DB2. This is one way to move customers over to DB2 if Derby doesn't meet their requirements. Similar to what Microsoft has done with MSDE (now SQL Server Express), except that the IBM way is arguably much friendlier since they've open sourced the codebase instead of just allowing free redistribution of Windows-only binaries.
Eric
IBM acquired Cloudscape as a by-product of acquiring Informix. Open sourcing it is one way to get rid of YADB (yet another database) to focus on their bread and butter, DB2. Probably not a bad deal for them in the sense that it generates lots of goodwill in the community at the same time. Not that I'm cynical or anything.
Eric
How to masquerade your browser
Not sure Cloudscape actually qualifies as "lightweight". Current Java-capable handheld devices are still pretty limited in what they can run, in many cases you still have to go down to the C/C++ level to truly get the "pedal to the metal". Over time this will correct itself, of course, but for now the choices for data persistence in Java are very limited. Most people I know end up rolling their own solution on top of MIDP's Record Management System.
Eric
Eric's J2ME Pages
Copyright rules vary greatly from country to country, though lately there's been more harmonization. The general rule is that copyright lasts for X years past the author's death or Y years in absolute terms if the author is in fact a corporation. The values for X and Y vary by country. Even within a country they can vary depending on when the work was created and what copyright legislation was in effect at the time. This makes it extremely difficult to figure out which works are in the public domain or not. Sometimes things ended up in the public domain because they weren't properly declared. But with the Berne convention in force over most of the world, you can't assume that no copyright declaration means that there is no copyright. It's a bit of a mess, and this surely won't be the only lawsuit they'll encounter.
Eric
Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified
If you don't have that much content and it doesn't change too often, then a CMS isn't absolutely necessary, is it? (My "CMS" is vi and psftp, I guess...)
EricWhy I hate Bell Mobility
Although it's always dangerous to generalize, I like to explain the differences between the Treo and the BlackBerry this way:
BlackBerry: email with applications
Treo: applications with email
You can build applications for both platforms, but the BlackBerry is still seen (and being used) primarily as a mobile email device. You can send and read email with the Treo, but you can run many more useful apps on it than on the BB. Which one is better? As usual, it depends on what you need...
EricBlackBerry development info
Adds a whole new dimension to the commercial, doesn't it?
This is your brain...
EricThis is your brain on drugs...
This is your brain on drugs flying a plane without you...
Why Vioxx is Prozac for lawyers
Nothing new here except that Google has all of a sudden made it easier to look up "private" information that is locally cached. The data is already there for someone who knows what to look at, after all, but now Google's made it easy to access. How is this different from typing something into the address bar of a browser and being presented with an "interesting" list of choices that were stored via the browser's autocomplete functionality?
Eric
Read a bit of Vioxx humor
Given the prevalence of camera phones in Japan, does anyone there try to ban their use in places like washrooms, change rooms, movie theatres, etc? Is it even possible to get a "pure" cellphone (no camera or fancy extras) in Japan these days?
Eric
See what information your browser is sending
Indeed. Try even putting a regular Bluetooth adapter next to your Wi-Fi router and see what happens. I wrote about this before http://www.mobilizedsoftware.com/showArticle.jhtml ?articleId=17501803. That's the price you pay for the convenience of unlicensed spectrum. It's made me hold off from getting a 2.4GHz cordless phone to replace the crappy 900MHz phone I already have -- just one more thing to interfere with the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks. (The microwave, at least, doesn't run that often...)
Eric
I have seen programmers obsessed with efficiency and speed waste time and money.
I have seen programmers obsessed with pleasing management waste time and money. Let's face it, there are zillions of ways to waste time and money. Writing more efficient code is a lesser evil in my mind.
We must change our thinking away from the idea of building a better mouse-trap toward selling mouse-traps.
Outside of academia, this has always been the case. Look at the top people at most technology companies, you'll see that they're business people -- usually from a sales and/or marketing background -- and not techies. Or they might have been techies in some early life but over the years migrated into selling roles. I think, though, that few techies have the skills to make that kind of leap. So just telling people to brush up on people skills isn't going to cut it, either. If you firmly believe that good programming skills are innate (more art than science) then chances are that good selling skills are also innate.
I guess I have no answers about the bigger questions this raises. That's why we're debating it. I still think, though, that it's useful for programmers to understand how sorting works so that they can choose the correct algorithm for each situation. Really, you don't go to university to learn to be a programmer, you go to university to learn how to learn what you need when you need it. IMHO.
EricThe reader comments on these articles are themselves interesting. I especially think this one is telling: "As a Java programmer I haven't looked up searching and sorting algorithms in Knuth". Being a Java programmer myself, I can certainly appreciate having these kinds of algorithms in a standard library. I still think you should spend some time with Knuth or some other book (or online documentation) and understand how they work. That's one problem I see, not enough programmers today learning the fundamentals and just letting the libraries do all the hard lifting for them.
Eric
Thanks to All-Bran, William Shatner 'goes like no man has gone before'
For a real blast from the past, check out the REXX FAQ that I maintained for a couple of years. Copies are still floating around the net, including here:
t
http://www.funet.fi/pub/languages/rexx/rexxfaq.tx
It seems so... old, I guess. But REXX itself was fun to use, and I spent a lot of time using it and writing applications with (and for) it. It was very approachable, a good way to learn basic programming concepts. It definitely rocked on the Amiga because it was so well-integrated with the system. If OS/2 had not failed, it might still be here, because it was also decently integrated there.
Eric
The funny thing is that if a RoboLawyer did exist, you'd probably have to use a clickwrap license to download it in the first place.
Eric
Vioxx recall reduces spam
I actually preferred Amazon's default search algorithm before they introduced "Search Inside the Book", because it limited its searches to the bibliographic data. Now when I do a search I get lots of books that contain the words I'm searching for, but that's not usually what I want. Annoying, and I have to go to the advanced search page for what I want.
I think keeping Google's Web index separate from the Print index is a good thing, based on this experience.
EricWhy the Vioxx recall is good for Google
Since there's been some mention of ASA (Adaptive Server Anywhere, aka SQL Anywhere), just thought I'd mention (sorta late) that ASA users are encouraged to fill out a survey put up by the iAnywhere database engineering team to improve the product: http://www.ianywhere.com/promos/sql_survey/index.h tml
Thanks...
Eric
A lot of developers are confused about J2ME, I have some overviews on my site at www.ericgiguere.com/j2me that should clear things up somewhat, including my handy-dandy J2ME acronym list.
Things are getting more exciting in the J2ME world, though I'd like to see more devices supporting the Personal Profile come on the market. It's interesting what people can do with today's devices and the quite-limited-in-comparison Mobile Information Device Profile.
Eric
These techniques are still in use today, actually. Although it's getting better, many Java-enabled cellphones (those that support J2ME, Java 2 Micro Edition) have a very small amount of space available for installing and running applications. So an important thing to do is to make your application as small as possible. You do some of this by refactoring your code, but you can also make your code smaller by running it through an obfuscator, because the obfuscator will replace all the long symbolic names (which are stored in the .class files) with shorter, meaningless ones as well as remove unreachable code, etc. But same basic techniques.
Eric
http://www.ericgiguere.com/j2me
Yes, you also see him on TV pushing (good way to describe it!) All-Bran quite, ahem, regularly in Canada. I just find it funny that they don't use his name anywhere on the box. That's why I call him the "nameless cereal box celebrity"...
Eric
SOCAN is a performing rights agency. It is the Canadian equivalent of BMI and ASCAP in the United States. These organizations collect money for the composers and publishers of music. They do not collect money for the recording artists. (Note that the composers and publishers are often different from the recording artists.) And they're not an industry lobby group like the RIAA.
Eric
You can always have your browser masquerade as a different browser. See my page Masquerading Your Browser for details. There's a link at the bottom to a page with instructions for Mac users.
Eric
Actually, I'm looking to record mostly voice & piano. I want to use a PC laptop mainly because I don't want to setup a mini-studio in the living room, where the grand piano is, so a portable solution appeals to me. I was looking at the Yamaha UW500 Personal Studio, and it looks pretty good, anyone have any experience with it or similar devices? Mostly I'm looking to record stuff to put up on my website. The gear built into the laptop just doesn't cut it -- play anything lound on the piano and it gets all distorted.
I've looked around for some advice, but most of it seems to be geared towards MIDI stuff or else involves equipment that is way too expensive for what I want to do.
Eric
The Java try-catch-finally construct is not the same as nesting a try-catch within another try-catch because the finally block is always executed. In your scenario the finally is only executed if an exception is thrown. Adding a throw at the end of the inner try will make it behave like try-catch-finally, but then you have to have code in the outer catch to distinguish between the various cases. try-catch-finally is a simpler way to do it.